Line Balancing Heuristics for Productivity Enhancement in Beverage Factory

The Assembly Line Balancing (ALB) objectives focus on improving the line efficiency, aiming at enhancing the productivity. Assembly line balancing seeks to tightly pack each station along the production line with respective tasks to minimize total ideal time and standardize the cycle time for production of particular product. This article adapted Longest Operating Time (LOT) heuristic to enhance productivity of production line in a beverage factory (Varun Beverages, Bhiwadi). Possible objectives functions of ALB, basing on task time, cycle time, station count either free or constrained, a time study is carried in this article and a new theoretical design of production line is made over initial operating production line with the values obtained from time study using the principles of Longest operating time. This proposition shows enhancement in productivity by optimizing total number of workstations and by reducing workers along the production line. There will be noticeable reduction in net cost per unit production on new production line design.